271: Hammett on Iskry
Here are a couple great Dashiell Hammett novellas published in Poland by Iskry in 1987 and ’88. Although the cover designs (by Wiesław Rosocha) are not as accomplished as many…
Here are a couple great Dashiell Hammett novellas published in Poland by Iskry in 1987 and ’88. Although the cover designs (by Wiesław Rosocha) are not as accomplished as many…
A quick book blog this week. I found this book on the street a couple months back, and am pretty impressed with the 1970s whole book design, channeling high modernist…
This week I thought I would just round up some of the cooler communist covers I’ve amassed over the past handful of years. It’s a nice collection, with material from…
About a month ago I came across a clutch of these great old anti-communist pamphlets at Book Thug Nation. Touted as the “Democracy versus Communism Series,” they are an amazing…
I’ve been on hiatus from this book blog for about six months, but I’m going to try to start posting new entries again, although time will likely only allow one…
I was surprised to stumble on this really nicely designed book by and about the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, published in 1971 by Collier, a major publishing house. It’s…
I found this amazing Canadian manual for printmaker safety earlier this year. The design is by Karen Patkau, and wonderfully captures the kind of overlap I find so visually enjoyable…
I excited that I’ve just had a piece I wrote on the social and design histories of Heinemann’s African Writers Series published on the Lapham’s Quarterly website. I’m planning on…
From the mid-1990s through the early 2000s, young radicals in the U.S. really only had one choice for a day planner, the Slingshot Organizer. I always had a love/hate relationship…
I’ve long been a fan of German photomontagist John Heartfield. His political montage work for publications like AIZ is often reproduced, and has been collected in a number of editions,…
I picked up this book in Portland, OR a couple years back. I’ve been an Alex La Guma fan since reading his slow-burning yet mesmerizing anti-apartheid struggle novel, In the…
I picked up this book while browsing Mother Foucault’s Bookshop in Portland, OR with Alec and Katie a couple years back. It was a little pricey for something I’ll never…
In order to not wait months between posts, I’m going to just share some individual books I’ve picked up over the last couple years that are extraordinary in some way….
Three of the most significant social realist printmakers working in the US in the second half of the 20th Century were Leonard Baskin, Antonio Frasconi, and Ben Shahn. While all…
While there is a fair amount of literature out there on the “paperback revolution” and the sea change in publications created by the Pocket Books imprint in the US (founded…
I recently was invited by the rad Moon Palace Books in Minneapolis to decorate one of the tables they’ve set up in their new cafe and restaurant over-looking the bookstore….
There are a couple really sweet spots (for me) where book cover design starts to feel sublime, and one of these is the “Green Period” of the Penguin crime series…
For those that haven’t heard, Ursula K. Le Guin, one of the most important Anglophone authors of the 20th century, passed away on January 22, 2018. I (and many here…
From the early 20th century through the early 1960s, one of the largest Left organizations in the US (if not the largest) was the Communist Party USA. The propaganda wing…
I’ve been sitting on these dozen covers for almost six years now. Back in 2012 my friend Jesse sent these scans from a visit to India, and it…
Back in the late 1980s, early 1990s it was difficult to be a young radical in the U.S. and not come across “The Pathfinder Tendancy,” a international group of Trotskyists…
The TV show Miami Vice ran from 1984–1990, closing out the decade with a slick, fashionable, multi-racial crime fighting duo that got to play it both ways—creating a sexy, alluring…
The Penguin Special ran for about fifty years, from 1937 through 1989 (although the latest date I’ve seen on one is 1986). Specials covers were red, one of army of…
While hunting for books in the Heinemann African Writers Series (by far the most expansive collection of writing from Africa in English, with interestingly designed covers to boot!) I began…
A couple months ago I stumbled onto twenty Dutch mass market paperbacks scattered across the $.50 and $1 racks at the Strand here in New York. Although I can’t read…
While working a shift at Book Thug Nation a couple years back, I stumbled across a couple really nicely designed hardbacks of Sartre’s philosophy. They’re interesting because they simultaneously have…
Three or four years ago I was supposed to go to a big book sales with my friends that run Book Thug Nation here in Brooklyn, but I ended up…
This week is the final installment of covers of novels by the extremely prolific Belgian author Georges Simenon. When it comes to Simenon hardbacks, I’m partial to the 60s/70s…
This week, more Simenon! Although rather than focusing in on the author himself, this is a perfect opportunity to dig into one of my favorite moments of paperback cover…
Following last post’s foray into genre fiction, I’ve now hopped from sci-fi to crime. I’m a huge fan of detective novels and crime fiction, and in some might say that…
I used to work hard at doing one of these Judging Books by Their Covers posts a week, but I’ve fallen of, and recently realized I’ve been doing more like…
This week is a bit of a divergence from my usual book cover fare. Instead of focusing on a publisher, author, or designer, I want to look at likely the…
For years I’ve been hunting down issues of Black Orpheus (which I featured in my last post, #241), and books from it’s spin-off publishing-wing Mbari. I honestly can’t remember how…
Black Orpheus: A Journal of African and Afro-American Literature is likely the most important literary journal to emerge out of Africa, and one of the most important in the world…
While collecting books from the African Writers Series published by Heinemann (I’ll be featuring those books in a future post), I stumbled upon what I first thought was a small…
This week’s focus is on the South African published house Ravan Press, which was founded in 1972 by Peter Randall, Danie van Zyl, and Beyers Naudé. On second glance, you’ll…
For months I’ve been working on a complete rewrite of the post I originally did here about the design of the book Black Power, and other related Civil Rights-era publications…
This week I don’t have a new focus. Instead I’ve gone back into a number of old posts and corrected mistakes, improved the writing, added new covers, and/or added better…
This week we find ourselves a decent distance from Ben Shahn. We’re looking at Cuba, actually, and in particular a really beautiful set of saddle-stitched publications put out by Editorial…
Welcome, finally, to the last installment on the book covers of Ben Shahn. Although this is the post I’m the least invested in, somehow it’s the one that has taken…
This week is the third installment of my Judging Books by Their Covers posts on the design work of Ben Shahn. For more on Shahn, and to see the other…
Welcome to the second week of my Ben Shahn book cover posts. You can check out week one, my stroll through the covers Shahn designed in the 1950s and 60s…
Ben Shahn is one of the artists most influential to many members of Justseeds. He was a Lithuanian immigrant who apprenticed as a lithographer before becoming a master of multiple…
Last month I got to give a talk at the Maine College of Art in Portland, which was great in and of itself, and had the added bonus of giving…
This week I’m going to close out my sub-series on Small Press Africa with sixteen books from Southern Africa. I hope people have enjoyed checking these books out as much…
This week we’re still in East Africa, with a focus on the dual publishers East African Literature Bureau and Kenya Literature Bureau. In an interesting turn, the Kenya Literature Bureau…
The undisputed center of publishing in East Africa is Nairobi, the capital of Kenya. Kenya is home to the majority of the regions presses, and was a key center for…
This week is a continuation of my series on African small press books (see HERE and HERE for the earlier installs), with a focus in on one Nigerian volume. The…
Last install (here) I shared five covers from books published by small African presses. Turns out my collection is a little bigger than I thought, with way more books than…
One of the things I’ve always got an eye out for are books published on small presses in Africa. It’s shocking how little about Africa makes into mainstream U.S. consciousness…
Much of what I focus on in these Judging Books blog posts is cover design that is quite rare, either because the politics are marginal (anarchism! communism! socialism! oh my!),…
Found this rare and fascinating little paperback on a book adventure Monica and I went on for my birthday last year. Tahsin Abdul Hai’s Power and Revolution: From the Impetus…
You wouldn’t necessarily know it from the books I’m usually discussing here, but a solid half or more of my reading intake is genre fiction, sci-fi and especially crime novels….
Welcome to the second installment in my sub-series of book covers from early utopian/distopian novels. Back in March of 2014 I took a look at the covers of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s…
For this week’s post I thought we could stay in Africa, but focus on an author instead of a publisher. Or maybe a combination of the two. One of the…
First, welcome to my new Judging Books by Their Covers blog channel on Justseeds.org! I’m really excited to relaunch the series on our new site, which not only looks 200%…
No in-depth analysis this week, but a peek at one really cool book, inside and out. Frances Kay’s This—is Grenada is a beautiful self-published travel book from 1966. After skimming…
First off, we’ve been hard at work on a brand new Justseeds website, which will vastly transform the experience of both the posting and reading of blog entries like these….
Back in 2012 I slide an eye-catching spine off the shelf at a bookstore in Boston and. It was an edition of Arnošt Lustig’s Diamonds in the Night I had…
Today I veer off from my regularly scheduled posting. 2015 is the 25 year anniversary of AK Press, one of the longest (maybe the longest?) running anarchist presses in the…
In November, while touring London with comrades from Interference Archive, we stopped at Bookmarks, a nice-sized bookshop run by the Socialist Workers Party (which is a sister organization to the…
This past weekend was the big annual church book sale in my neighborhood, and I found some great books, including a mini-collection of mass market paperbacks from the 1960s about…
Back to Africa this week. I’ve got a massive backlog of African publishers I want to cover, but tracking down information about them is often difficult, as most no longer…
This week I’m going to go through the second half of Little New World Paperbacks, roughly in order of their issue number. The last number I’ve found is LNW-39, although…
From the early 20th century through the early 1960s, one of the largest Left organizations in the US (if not the largest) was the Communist Party USA. The propaganda…
One of my favorite art books is Images of a Revolution, a oversized if slim volume on the murals of revolutionary Mozambique. It was published in 1983 by the Zimbabwe…
As many of you know, I’m a big collector of African paperbacks (and ones about Africa), and I’ve been slowing featuring different presses here on the blog. Past features include:…
Over the last couple years I’ve been finding old political mass market books about Ireland, and squirreling them away. Then I realized they’re actually all published by the same press,…
A quick week, only one cover today. I recently found this amazing copy of Isaac Babel’s play Benia Krik. The design is attributed to “Lloyd,” the book published by Collet’s…
This week we swing from left to far right, Africa to Belmont, Massachusetts. Sorry for the whiplash. The Americanist Library is a collection of almost twenty mass market paperbacks put…
There were three major British publishers which began putting out books by African authors in the late 1950s and early 1960s, especially to the educational book market. The big two…
The second half of Leonard Baskin’s book cover output I’ve found is composed of facial portraits. The portrait of Kafka to the right is exceptional. The picture feels like it…
In my mind, three of the most significant social realist printmakers that were working in the US in the second half of the 20th Century were Leonard Baskin, Antonio Frasconi,…
Ronald Clyne is best known as the brilliant designer of most of the Folkways label record covers, over 500 from the 1950s through the early 1980s (for more on that,…
The first “Judging Books by Their Covers” post was on April 12, 2010. Four and half years and over 2,000 book covers later, I’ve reached the two hundred post mark….
In honor of my upcoming trip to London, I thought I’d do a feature on a little known lefty publisher from the UK. For awhile now I’ve been running into…
Back in 2011 I published a couple posts looking at the covers of New Century Publishers, a Communist Party-run press that published from the 1940s into the 1960s, and appears…
For the past decade I’ve slowly been collecting all kinds of paperbacks published about and within Africa. Last year at the Haunted Bookshop in Iowa City I ran across a…
A brief break from the longer entries, I wanted to share this amazing cover from Susy Smith’s ESP (Pyramid Books, 1962). I can mostly let it speak for itself, but…
I’m going to try to be a little less complete-ist than I’ve been in the past, hopefully making these posts a bit easier to compile. To that end, this is…
Scanlan’s Monthly was a New Left political/counter-cultural magazine that ran for eight issues and less than a year, March 1970 to January 1971. It was co-founded and co-edited by Warren…
For the first four weeks of looking at the output of Curbstone Press, I broke the books into semi-distinct categories: Roque Dalton and Curbstone’s origins, Claribel Alegría and other Latin…
Sometime in the late 1970s the editors at Curbstone must have crossed paths with a figure involved in political culture in Denmark. A series of poetry chapbooks by Danish authors…
In 1981, Curbstone Press began publishing a series of small pamphlets of critical non-fiction writing by international practitioners of political art. This series, entitled Art on the Line, ran for…
Curbstone was not just an independent poetry press, but it’s core mission was political, to publish and bring awareness to culture as a tool of struggle in Latin America. One…
I was in a used bookshop in Denver in 1995 and I was looking in the poetry section for some reason. I have no memory as to why, I had…
Here’s my final entry in the Foreign Languages Press series (not that there aren’t plenty more books put out by FLP—thousands, actually). You can see the other posts HERE. I…
One of the main things that Foreign Languages Press books have in common is covers that attempt to meld the pastoral (peasants and peasant society) with the industrial (and technological),…
Founded in 1952, three years after the Communist Revolution, Foreign Languages Press is one of the external propaganda arms of the Chinese Communist Party. They supposedly have published over 30,000…
Over the past year I stumbled upon these two handsome books from the Philippines. Although they were published by different companies almost fifteen years apart, they both share a really…
I found this great book on a dollar rack here in New York City. It’s a 1961 edition (Phoenix Books, a division of the University of Chicago Press) of…
This week I present to you this “Fair, Candid, and Impartial Treatment of the Subject [of the conflict between Capital and Labor] from a Non-partisan and Christian Standpoint”!! E.T. Russell’s…
I’ve got a lot of longer-format book cover series in the works for the blog, but they are taking much longer than the one-week chunks I have been trying to…
Back in November 2013 I did a post on the cover designs of the American University in Cairo’s Modern Arabic Writing series circa 1990s (you can see it HERE). I…
This week’s covers are from Dover Math books I’ve found over the past six months at Book Thug Nation bookstore. You can see the last two posts about Dover books…
I keep running into more and more cool covers on Dover books about science and math (and some art…) from the 1950s/60s. I first looked at these almost a year…
While I was in Québec City two weeks ago I found some nice examples of book covers from Québécois authors. I know very little about the Québec book trade, but…
Finding the Science Fiction Book Club covers (see last week’s post HERE) got me thinking about abstraction as a representation of Sci Fi, and I started digging around for other…
I recently stumbled upon a small handsome science fiction hardback at a used book sale. The cover of Wilson Tucker’s The Lincoln Hunters is entirely abstract, but still manages to…
This week back to Zamyatin’s We, and a look at all the non-English editions. (You can check out all the English-language covers HERE.) When first written, the book was not…
I’m slightly embarrassed that I only read Yevgeny Zamyatin’s (Eugene Zamiatin) We for the first time about two months ago. Not embarrassed because it’s something everyone should read, but embarrassed…
Just a quick look today at a couple of 1960s academic history books about Africa. I found these on the cheap at the great West Philly bookstore A House…
Although much respected, Amilcar Cabral didn’t actually write that much beyond speeches and lectures. But there is a large body of literature about Cabral, and the struggle in Portuguese Guinea….
Last week I looked at the covers of books by African revolutionary and theorist Amilcar Cabral that were in English. This week lets take a peek at his books published…
I was introduced to Amilcar Cabral when I was in college. His name popped up along with other African and Caribbean revolutionaries I was reading like Frantz Fanon, Walter Rodney,…
Continuing with my cleaning up and filling in the gaps in old posts, here’s nine more covers from the East German, English-language publisher Seven Seas. You can check out the…
I had originally hoped that once I posted a series of covers here on the blog, I’d be able to move on to new book explorations. But that’s not the…
Back in 1974, someone smart at the British radical, socialist press Pluto decided to publish the first of a series of Workers’ Handbooks. The Hazards of Work: How to Fight…
Here is another gem unearthed at Brooklyn’s best bookstore, Book Thug Nation. The title is a bit contested, as the cover says it’s Short Stories from Puerto Rico, and the…
This week I’ve got another quirky book to share, but we’ll be jumping from East Germany to Laos. I found this small, cheaply produced book—The Wood Grouse—in Portland, OR. It…
This week is the final in a series of posts about mini-East German poster books (see HERE and HERE). This week’s book, Plakate zum Ersten Mai (Posters for May Day)…
This weeks book is the second in a series of mini-poster publication produced in the DDR, or former East Germany. Last week we looked at a book about posters celebrating…
When I first traveled to Berlin back in 2007, doing research for Signal with Alec Dunn, we spent a lot of time haunting bookstores. Being a book junkie, there’s little…
Over the past two years I’ve been stumbling across old, early paperbacks published in the 1930s by Modern Age Books in New York. They seem like a lefty publisher in…
In the late 2000s, in the basement of the Caliban Bookshop in Pittsburgh, I found a handsome paperback edition of Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun. It was the first…
After Walter Rodney and Andrew Salkey, the most important author Bogle-L’Overture published was the Jamaican-born but London-based street poet Linton Kwesi Johnson. Kwesi Johnson become a popular voice of the…
I first encountered Bogle-L’Overture Publications almost twenty years ago. Outside of Boston their is a strange bookstore called the New England Mobile Bookfair. Neither mobile nor a book fair, it…
For this final week of Edward Gorey covers, I’ve pulled together all the stragglers I could find, covers he did that are later or not for Doubleday Anchor. The Rilke…
Last week I looked at a chunk of Anchor Doubleday paperbacks from the 1950s and 60s with covers by Edward Gorey. You can see them and read it HERE. Last…
One of the great things about working at a bookstore is you start to notice more and more quirky little things about books, stuff that only the week before passed…
I was in San Francisco in the Spring of 2012 for the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair, and since I had a little extra time I made the rounds of the…
While rooting around Interference Archive looking for student movement books over the past couple weeks, I pulled out a whole set of different editions of what might be the most…
Last week I looked at the phenomena of 1960s and 70s mass-market paperback publishers trying to cash in on interest in the giant student movement in the United States at…
The last handful of years have seen an explosion in student organizing, here in the States, but also across the world, with hot spots in the UK, Austria, Sudan, and…
While in Palestine I visited over a dozen libraries and archives, and got to take a look at an entire world of books that was previously unknown to me. One…
When I was tracking down all the books in the Penguin African Library (see HERE), I came across an old novel based in South Africa that Penguin published, W.H. Canaway’s…
As I’ve mentioned before, I sometimes work at my friends’ bookshop here in Brooklyn called Book Thug Nation. It’s a great place, and there are many, many nuggets of book…
Here’s the third and final week of covers from the Fontana African Fiction series. I’ve given a bunch of back story and context for these covers in the previous two…
This week is a continuation of the covers from the Fontana African Fiction series. You can look at last weeks post and introduction to the books and their design HERE….
While hunting for books in the Heinemann African Writers Series (by far the most expansive collection of writing from Africa in English, and interestingly designed covers to boot!) I began…
So in order to keep abreast of my book hoarding, I work one day a week at one of the best bookstores in New York City, Book Thug Nation. Recently…
So I found a couple last Seven Seas books, including two of the Africa-related ones I had been looking for. This will be the final installment of the Seven Seas…
For this fourth look into the book covers of Seven Seas, I’m going to just run through the rest of the titles I’ve been able to find. (To see the…
For this third entry into the books put out by East German publisher Seven Seas in the 1960s and 70s, I want to look in-depth at a single title. By…
Seven Seas also published a number titles related to Africa, in particular novels and short stories by South African writers. I’ve been able to find four of these titles, but…
I was over my friend Aaron’s house nine months ago or so, and stumbled upon a book on his shelf published by Seven Seas Books. The spine was clean and…
Are you worried about global warming? Don’t fret, because in twelve short years you’ll have much bigger problems to deal with: The scum of the earth will have taken over…
This week is the third and final installment of covers from Collier’s African/American Library series. What we’ve got left are the books by African-Americans, and unlike the African novels, most…
I love mass market paperbacks. They are small, fit in your pocket, and were usually printed cheaply and in such volume that they hold little monetary value these days. Most…
While collecting books from the African Writers Series published by Heinemann (I’ll be featuring those books in a future post), I stumbled upon a small series of African novels produced…
I guess did this a little backwards. I focused on the later published books last week, and now here is Puerto Rico: Analysis of a Plebiscite, as far as I…
As I’ve written about elsewhere, my Celebrate People’s History poster series is in part inspired by the down-and-dirty poster printing of 1960s and 70s Third World liberation movements. In many…
About a month ago my friend Cindy and I went to go see the jaw-dropping remake of Red Dawn (and that’s an entirely different story—wow, what an amazingly delusional Tea…
This week is the last installment of covers from the second series of Anarchy magazine from London, which ran for 38 issues from 1971 to 1985 (see the previous entries…
Welcome back to part six of my focus on the second series of the UK magazine Anarchy. Last week we looked at a series of covers done largely by anarchist…
This week we’ve got some great covers! To the right is Anarchy #21. I actually should have included this issue—and the next one, #22—with last weeks entry, as it fits…
With issue 15 Anarchy goes through another facelift. For this, and the next three issues, we’ve got a straight sans serif masthead in white on a fading, dark to light,…
With issue #10, Anarchy comes into it’s own, settling into a fixed masthead and confident enough to continue to eschew the traditional anarchist red and black and experiment with deep…
Welcome back to part two of our tour through the second series of the UK Anarchy magazine. Click HERE to see last week’s entry. Let’s pick up where we left…
In Signal:01, Alec Dunn and I ran an interview with Rufus Segar, the graphic designer who did the vast majority of the covers for the British monthly journal Anarchy. Not…
On my recent trip to whirlwind tour of the Midwest (or at least Chicago, Grand Rapids, and Milwaukee) I’ve been hitting up all the used bookstores I can find, looking…
Here’s another great find from the foreign language table at a regional bookfair, this one in Poughkeepsie, NY. I was immediately attracted to the book because of the nicely embossed…
In early Summer I went with friends from Book Thug Nation to a regional book sale in Pennsylvania. The sale was awesome, thousands and thousands of books packed into a…
For the final installment of book covers from the Penguin African Library (see the first nine posts HERE), I’m going to take a look at the other books on Africa…
This is the 9th part of my series on the covers of the Penguin African Library and associated titles, and the second part on the covers of series editor Ronald…
I had been collecting the Penguin African Library books for awhile when I stumbled upon this copy of Into Exile at the local, and very cool, Brooklyn used book shop…
The Penguin African Library (see HERE for earlier cover posts) was the brain child of Ronald Segal, a Jewish South African who grew to despise the Apartheid system and organize…
So over the past five weeks I’ve gone through the entire Penguin African Library (PAL), proper, but there is so much more to look at! There was actually a predecessor…
Welcome to the fifth week of covers from the Penguin African Library (PAL). If you find yourself a bit lost trying to follow some of this, it might make sense…
I guess will start this week off with one of the darker—in content and color—covers for the Penguin African Library. Reginald H. Green and Ann Seidman’s Unity of Poverty: The…
This week we’ll pick up with the fifteenth title in the Penguin African Library (PAL), Peter Mansfield’s Nasser’s Egypt (AP16: 1965). With this book the separation of the three sections…
This week I’m going to continue working through the covers of the Penguin African Library, started last week HERE. Once again, one of the things I find so compelling about…
In 1962, British paperback publisher Penguin launched a new book series, the Penguin African Library (PAL). Along with the Heinemann African Writers Series, it is one of the most ambitious…
Here is the final post in this long-running Fanon series. Thanks to all that have been with me for the entire ride! You can see all the covers (133 different…
Let’s start off the second installment of Fanon biographies with Jock McColloch’s Black Soul, White Artifact (Cambridge University, 1983), which takes the African mask metaphor further than any of the…
This week I’m going to dig into the biographies and books about Frantz Fanon. I’m going to start with three of the most popular biographies: Irene L. Gendzier’s Fanon: A…
Now that I’ve gone through all the Fanon titles proper, here is a collection of strange odds and ends, books that contain Fanon’s writing, but aren’t standard editions. To start…
Toward the African Revolution was first published in 1964, after Fanon’s death. It is a broad collection of his short essays, many written while he was traveling across Africa as…
The second book written by Fanon was A Dying Colonialism. The book was originally published in 1959 by Maspero in France as Year Five of the Algerian Revolution, then later…
Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks was initially published in 1952 by Editions Du Seuil. I’ve been digging around and have yet to find a cover for that first edition,…
If Wretched of the Earth is Fanon’s manual for anti-colonial revolt, Black Skin, White Masks is the intellectual backbone behind it. Originally published in 1952, and based on his rejected…
Let’s start off part two of the covers of Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth (read part one HERE) with this beautiful cover from the 1961 Portuguese edition published by Editora…
I can’t quite remember exactly when and where I was first introduced to Frantz Fanon. I do remember pulling down the pocket paperback to the right (Grove Press, 1968) off…
What better way to celebrate 100 posts about book covers than another batch of B. Traven designs! Here’s part ten of my features on Traven, this time adding 34 more…
One of the most compelling political symbols of the 20th century is the hammer and sickle. Although it was created during the Russian Revolution, and became the official symbol of…
Working on the Angela Davis covers has got me thinking about representations of Black liberation. In particular, I’ve been trying to sort out and understand the surprisingly successful cover to…
Here’s the last hurrah of the Angela Davis covers (pending any great ones y’all might send in to me!), a collection of books by other authors about Davis and her…
Onward to the Angela Davis pamphlets! Because these have been produced by a diverse collection of publishers and activist groups, the design is much broader and more interesting than the…
While working on my posts about the covers of books about prisons (JBbTC 39–45, 52), I started a folder of Angela Davis covers, which has now grown large enough to…
I’ve never hidden my admiration for the sheer volume of creativity, thoughtful illustration, and sharp design that has gone into the production of Penguin Books, especially from the 1950s through…
My friend R. Marut in London has come through again with some more books I had missed, so here are the last three Kronstadt covers. First is this handsome Freedom…
This week I’ve got even more Kronstadt covers, with a lot of help from Dave at Recollection Books in Seattle (thanks!). To the right is the dust jacket of the…
I wanted to start this week off with a counterpoint to last weeks generally pro-Kronstadt sailor covers. To the left is the cover of Kronstadt by Lenin and Trotsky, published…
This week’s post is inspired by the book to the right, which I came across on Alec’s bookshelf during a recent visit to Pittsburgh. Emanuel Pollack’s The Kronstadt Rebellion (New…
Some of you might have noticed I’ve shorted the name of these posts to JBbTC, but I’ve also re-sorted and organized them, as well as titled them by content, so…
Every once in awhile I need to catch my breath from doing these covers, and that’s a good moment to go back and fill in any missing pieces and odds…
OK, I couldn’t help myself. Even though I went through the eight Boni Paper Books I actually have over the past two weeks (HERE and HERE), I started getting so…
Here is part two of my series on the early American paperback experiment known as Boni Paper Book. To read the back story, and see the first four books I…
Two weekends ago I got a chance to take a short trip to Pittsburgh to get a much needed mini-vacation and visit with fellow Justseeds’ members Bec, Icky, Mary, and…
Here is part two of the covers of G.K. Chesterton’s 1908 anarchist exploitation novel The Man Who Was Thursday. You can see the first 17 covers from last week HERE….
A couple months ago I was looking around a great local Brooklyn new/used bookshop, Unnameable, and I stumbled on a book cover featuring an cool looking illustration of a riot…
About a month ago I started getting emails from my friend Charles, who works for the Journal of Palestine Studies. He started digging up old issues of an Arabic language…
This week I’m going to jump back to Germany in the 60s and 70s, and look at Fizz, an antiauthoritarian political paper which split with Agit 883. Editors from Agit…
About three years back I bought a small collection of cheap, but relatively handsome, UK Anarchist pamphlets under the title New Anarchist Review. They stretched from 1984 into the early…
Here’s the last batch of Agit883 covers! These all rely on some version of collage and montage, to varying effects…I’m actually up to my neck in a poster project for…
This week we’ve got more Agit 883. Like last week, I’m blitzed with other work and life issues, so I’m mostly going to just let these ride, and speak for…
Here’s week three of covers of the German anti-capitalist paper Agit 883. This week I want to look at the covers that use the conventions of popular comic books to…
Here’s week two of covers from the German 60s/70s publication Agit 883. Last week (HERE) I looked at the covers of the first 13 (of 88) issues, and broke the…
Continuing and expanding on last week’s post on the covers of Sabat, an ’80s German ultra-left magazine, this week I’m going to go way to the late 60s, and look…
I think I’ll keep exploring the covers of obscure ultra-left political journals for awhile! Although not exactly known for their graphic sensibilities, there are definitely some interesting looking antiauthoritarian political…
I’m trying to decide what feature this week while riding out this hurricane hitting the east coast. Hopefully I’ll get this up and posted before the power goes out (if…
My friend “Ret” has sent me some great covers a couple times now. Originally a couple of B. Traven ones, and now a lot more (plus some Angela Davis covers…
This week will be the final round-up of the Ukranian covers I’ve been looking at for the past couple weeks. If you’re interested and haven’t seen them, you can check…
Here’s the second part of the Ukranian communist book stash I found in upstate NY. (Part one can be found HERE.) To the left is the cover for a book…
A couple months back I got to spend an amazingly fun and relaxing weekend at a strange old Ukranian summer camp in Monroe, NY called Arrow Park. It was the…
I recently got the word from PM Press that I’m designing two covers for reprints of C.L.R. James books. It’s quite an honor, as James is one of those interesting…
For the next week I’m in Pittsburgh helping Justseeds install our piece in the upcoming Pittburgh Biennial, so unfortunately I don’t have a ton of time for the next couple…
A couple months back I was browsing the shelves at the awesome Book Thug Nation bookstore in Brooklyn and I came across a nice paperback copy of Julius Fuchik’s Spanish…
I’m very excited to have a new studio, which will also be the home of Interference Archive, but between packing, moving, building shelving, and regular freelance work, I haven’t had…
I had intended to follow-up last weeks post about Elephant Editions Anarchist Pocketbook series (check it out HERE) with the covers of another of their popular book/pamphlet series, the eight…
Dove-tailing off of last weeks post on the UK publisher Shortfuse, this week I’m going to start a series of posts on the UK/Italian anarchist publisher Elephant Editions. I believe…
In January 1994 I made my first visit to the UK and to London. At the time there were two functional anarchist spaces in town that were open to the…
This week I’m looking at the final bits and pieces from Eberhardt Press. I’ve got a couple book and pamphlet covers here, and some things Eberhardt printed but didn’t design….
Welcome to part two of my series focused on the Portland, OR printer and publisher Eberhardt Press. Over the past 7 years Eberhardt has developed a series of signature stylistic…
After looking at one of the anarchist presses with the best cover design of the 1970s and 80s, I wanted to look ahead and see who is doing something comparable…
Here’s the second half of the remaining Cienfuegos Press covers. The image to the left is the cover of Towards a Citizens Militia. It seems so audacious now (and maybe…
OK, now turning the corner on the follow-up posts and into new material, this week I’m going to look at the covers of the British anarchist publisher Cienfuegos Press, which…
Here’s the last of the B. Traven covers. This week I’ve rounded-up 33 covers, so I’m going to forgo much of my witty banter and pretty much just dump all…
By far the most response to this book cover blog over the past year was to the six-week installment about the covers of the mysterious German-born, Mexican-bound, antiauthoritarian novelist B….
So I’ve got all these Cienfuegos Press and B. Traven covers to follow-up on last year’s posts, but I haven’t had the time to pull them all together. Instead, for…
Following up on last weeks post, and some of last years covers that slipped through the cracks, here is a cool selection of New World Paperbacks (NWP) covers. The original…
Well, I have to say, I’m pretty excited that I’ve now done a full year’s worth of “Judging Books by Their Covers” blog posts! Week 52! In what has otherwise…
After filling the last three months with two different five-week series (prisons and Kropotkin), I’m ready to jump into something completely different. For the most part over the past year…
Here’s the final installment of the Peter Kropotkin book cover series, 19 covers this week, 69 total over the five week series. Although what initially drew me to doing these…
Over the next couple weeks I’m going to dig through the rest of the Peter Kropotkin covers I’ve found. Most are beardless, and many are banal at best, but there…
No more beards, but this week I’ve found cool old-school Kropotkin covers, 19th Century to early 20th. The one above is a great Czech modernist cover for Anarchist Morality, designed…
Here is the next batch of Kropotkin beard covers. Like I mentioned last week, most covers of books by classic anarchist protagonists seem to focus on portraits, but since most…
Given the last 2 months of book covers relating to prisons, I thought it would be nice to take a little break and go off on some tangents. To start,…
So moving on, this is the final entry of the posts covering the covers of prison books. I’ve missed a lot along the way, and maybe I’ll do a follow-up…
In many ways the quintessential political prisoner of the 60s was George Jackson. At age 18 he was caught robbing a gas station, and sentenced to an indeterminate period of…
Now I’m going to move into the next sub-collection of prison book covers, books about political prisoners in the U.S. Officially the U.S. does not acknowledge that it holds political…
About 3 or 4 years after I first got involved in the then-tiny prison activist movement, the movement began quickly growing on college campuses, and a new round of activist,…
The real game changing book for prison studies was Michael Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. Interestingly, the covers of the book in English, from the first hardback to the current paperback,…
I first became sensitized to the problems within the U.S. prison system in the early 1990s. A friend brought me to an event in Washington, DC about the political prisoner…
For the next month of so I’m going to focus on the covers of books about U.S. prisons. Something uplifting for the new year! I first became involved in prison-related…
In 1978, just across the border from South Africa in Gabarone, a group of exiled South Africans formed the Medu Art Ensemble. Medu became an armed cultural wing of the…
Orwell was lucky to be published in the UK by Penguin, one of the publishers with the best record of concern for, and investment, in their book covers. The cover…
The book to the left is the copy of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia that I grew up with (I think I first read it early on in high school)….
For the final John Heartfield cover installment, I’ve collected a smattering of covers he’s done for a bunch of different publishers. Like I said at the beginning, I think his…
This week we’ll look at some John Heartfield designed covers he did for publishers other than Malik-Verlag. The covers here are from two other Berlin publishing houses: Verlag für Literatur…
Part four of the Heartfield covers, part two of the Upton Sinclair ones. Now we’re up to 1928, in which Malik Verlag published three separate Upton Sinclair books: Die…
One of the main authors Malik-Verlag published was Upton Sinclair, and Heartfield designed ALL of Sinclair’s covers. This week will do part one of Sinclair, next week the rest. Let’s…
Here’s the next batch of Heartsfield’s Malik-Verlag covers. The one to the right is a favorite, Franz Carl Weiskopf’s Umsteigen ins 21. Jahrhundert: Episoden von einer Reise durch die Sowjetunion….
Sometime in the early 1990s I was introduced to the photomontages of John Heartfield. The stark black and white collage work meshed well with my punk aesthetic tastes at the…
A couple years back I was checking out a Robert Capa exhibition at the International Center for Photography in NYC and they had a small backroom with an auxiliary exhibition…
Here’s part two of the Futurist books. Marinetti’s books in particular get more violent and aggressive in this period, with references to bombs, words exploding across the page, etc. There…
Now lets take a quick stop over in Italy. When I was in Rome a couple years back for an exhibition (at the excellent House of Love and Dissent), I…
Let’s stay in France this week, and check out the covers of Action, the newspaper developed by the Comités d’ Action during May 68. The first Comités were developed as…
Here’s the final installment (for now), on Polish poster artist and designer Roman Cieslewicz. In 1968 Cieslewicz was invited to design the cover style for a new line of philosophy,…
Part two on Polish poster artist and designer Roman Cieslewicz. Before leaving for Paris, Cieslewicz was the art director for the Polish cultural magazine Ty i Ja (You and I)….
Let’s take a quick break from US publications and skip over to Europe. A couple years back I discovered the Polish poster artist and designer Roman Cieslewicz. Although well known…
Here’s another installment of covers of a periodical, this time Radical America, which began as an organ of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1967, and then ran into…
Back at the end of June I was in Toronto, strangely at an academic performance art conference to talk about the Spectres of Liberty project, and their was a table…
Now for a slight break from the usual program. When I was out in Wisconsin a couple years back for a wedding we stumbled upon a small town library book…
Ahh, the final installment of the covers of Mr. Berick Traven, or Ret Marut, or Otto Feige, or Hal Croves? No one has yet been able to fully pin down…
For part 5 of the B. Traven covers, I’m going to focus on a number of his lesser known novels (He wrote five or six outside of the Treasure of…
Recapping last week: In the decade from 1931 to 1940, B. Traven published a series of six books known as his Jungle Novels: Government (1931), The Carreta (aka The Cart)…
In the decade from 1931 to 1940, B. Traven published a series of six books known as his Jungle Novels: Government (1931), The Carreta (aka The Cart) (1931), March to…
Next up in the B. Traven book cover-athon is The Death Ship. My favorite Traven novel (well, maybe a tie with The Rebellion of the Hanged), The Death Ship is…
This week we take a trip a little bit beyond the limits of my friends’ and my book collections. This is the first in a series of posts collecting the…
Here’s part two of the New World Paperbacks series. I’ve only got a dozen different books on my shelf, but if anyone else out there has some more cool NWP…
The next couple weeks entries will be focused on the covers of New World Paperbacks, which was an imprint of the Communist Party, USA’s main publishing house International Publishers. I…
This week I’m just going to focus on one book, and actually open the cover! For years I’ve been giving various versions of a talk and slideshow about political printmaking,…
I found this nice little collection of Portuguese modernist book covers in a friends academic office. They are from the 30s-60s. They designs are all hand painted, with the type…
A quick-y this week, here are three covers of Norwegian-published anarchist titles I found in the shelves at my friend Bergsveinn’s house in Bergen. The Kropotkin book is hilarious, with…
Here’s the last installment of the Cienfuegos/Costantini covers. Bits and pieces. This Tifft cover is one of the best in my opinion, the graphic is crisp and commanding, and the…
Here’s the second installment of Flavio Costantini covers for Cienfuegos Press. The five this week are a series of covers he did, each designed with the letter A (for Anarchy)…
For years I’ve been a fan of the look and feel of the Cienfuegos Press books published by Stuart Christie in the UK in the late 1970s-early 1980s. I stumbled…
Here’s a nice clutch of book covers from Hebrew volumes. Even though I took Hebrew school for a couple years, I mostly read comic books, so I have no idea…
Part 3 (and final part for now) of the covers of the Liberation Support Movement. This Sowing the First Harvest cover is quite nice, a striking block print (attributed to…
Part two of the covers from the LSM Information Network, some of these are less graphically powerful than last weeks, but there are still a couple gems. I particularly…
This week I want to share part one of a collection of book and pamphlet covers from the Liberation Support Movement (LSM), an organization that primarily did solidarity work with…
I’ve been really digging designing book covers of late, which has made me look much closer at all the other covers I come across and already have on my shelf….